Book: "The Elegance of the Hedgehog"

In every bookstore, even Powell's, perhaps especially Powell's, you'll invariably find this book in the STAFF RECOMMENDS section. It has a unique title, and a well-designed jacket. It's made of that same sort of matte material they used to make Vivid VHS boxes out of - so nice. And where did that precocious French girl get her boots?



And then you read it. Preferably where people can see you, because you know they've all seen it in the NYROB or on the EMPLOYEE PICKS shelf, and now they all think you're smart and awesome, good job!

It's like this: Don't you love it when there's a precious French setting, like a Parisian hotel, peopled with intellectual concierges, despicable food critics, and pre-teen solopists? And don't you love it so hard when the lonely hotel inhabitants, so disconnected from society, so much smarter and better than the outside world, get to ruminate at length about how much smarter and better they are?

It's the kind of book where we know that the lonely concierge and the lonely little girl are destined to be friends because each, separately, falls in love with a vague sense of Orientalism. (It's the kind of book where you feel smart for having seen the COMPLETELY BORING "Hiroshima, Mon Amor.")

It's the kind of book where everyone else is shallow, and greedy, and fake: Holdon Caufield territory. It's the kind of book where characters think not very hard at all about how good they are at Philosophy 101, and journal it out anyway.

It's the kind of book, essentially, where at the end one of the main characters dies, which leads another character to decide not to kill herself. It's the kind of book that starts out being all about a world of Hierarchy and Capitalism, and ultimately ends up being about the characters' Hope and Humanity.

No. Ultimately... it's the kind of book that makes you wish you hadn't paid $14.95 for it. Decision: Fail.